My Droplet's IP Address Was Inaccessible Suddenly Last Night

Question

Last night 8/30/22 around 11:40pm I received notification that my IP address for my server could not be reached. Any network or device I tried received an “ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT” error when attempting to connect to the assigned domain or straight IP address.

Looking at my Digital Ocean account, this droplet in question showed to be online and running properly and was accessible through the recovery console. No changes had been made that would take down the public IP address like this. Though I did check and do -

DNS Settings,

Nginx settings,

Rebooted the entire server via command prompt,

Rebooted droplet via Digital Ocean shutdown command,

Checked Fail2Ban, restarted, stopped, etc.

I was about to attempt more in depth troubleshooting as none of these resets seemed to make a different. And had made no adjustments to my Nginx settings or anything else when suddenly the public IP came back online about an hour and a half after it went down. What happened??

It appears I did nothing that actually fixed the outage on our public IP for this droplet, as it was still down after every reboot and restarted program. And there are no leads in the error logs I can tell of that caused the public IP address to suddenly be inaccessible.

The public IP address for this droplet is an auto-assigned one and not reserved.

I’m running Debian 8.10 and have had this server running for almost 3 years straight without error.

Is this an issue with my droplet? Some kind of a IP address update Digital Ocean performed last night? Are reserved IP addresses more dependable?

Any insight into this would be much appreciated, thank you!

KFSys · Answer

Hi @andrewaseal , Usually, when you receive such an error it’s because some service is down, like Nginx. It’s weird if you restarted all services and the issue still persisted. What I’ll recommend is to check your Nginx logs to see if you can spot the error there.